A Proper Place for God: Ma Zhu’s Chinese-Islamic Cosmogenesis

This chapter focuses on Ma Zhu (1640-after 1710), a Yunnanese literatus educated in the Neo-Confucian and Islamic curricula, author of the classical Chinese text Qingzhen zhinan (the compass or guide to Islam). His intended audience included both non-Muslim elites and Muslims literate only in that language. As he justified his ancestral religion, he had to solve an intractable problem—how could he narrate creation of the cosmos ex nihilo, a necessary part of the description of the Islamic God (Ar. Allāh), in a cultural context that lacked a cosmic creator? He solved this by placing God at the beginning of the conventional Neo-Confucian progression of the cosmos’s uncaused, impersonal evolution—from the chaos of Beyond Ultimate (wuji), via the Great Ultimate (taiji), yin and yang, the Five Phases, Heaven and Earth (qiankun) to phenomenal reality. Though unsuccessful in persuading non-Muslims of God’s cosmogenetic power, Ma Zhu’s book remains popular among Sino-Muslims, who combine Chinese and Islamic cultures in their intellectual and religious lives.

Tianfang Sanzijing: Exchanges and Changes in China’s Reception of Islamic Law

This chapter examines the implications of the legal discourse set forth by a Chinese primer for Muslims, the Tianfang Sanzijing (Three Character Classic of Islam), regarding notions of Islamic “legitimacy” and “orthodoxy.” Credited to the author of the Tianfang Dianli, Liu Zhi (1662-ca. 1736), and animated by that book’s purpose of reconciling Islamic law with the legal culture of the Qing, Liu’s concise primer on the main tenets of Islam spoke to a broader audience than its textual antecedent. This chapter argues that the Muslim Sanzijing set the ground for an independent development of Islamic law in the Chinese context, one that had the power to detach China from conventional Islamic jurisprudence outside its frontiers while remaining consistent with the overarching legal principles of Sunni Islam.

Liu Zhi: The Great Integrator of Chinese Islamic Thought

Liu Zhi (ca. 1660 – ca. 1730) was the consummate exemplar of the late Ming - early Qing (16th-19th c.) Chinese Muslim scholarly community that produced the Han kitāb corpus, promoting Islam as entirely consonant with Neo-Confucian norms. He continued a tradition of translating Islamic ideas into classical Chinese but added his own original thought and innovative methods. Engaged not only with Confucianism but also with Daoism, Buddhism, and the other Abrahamic traditions, he drew upon and synthesised eclectic sources and influences, from mysticism to ritualism. He also inspired subsequent generations of Chinese Muslims by constructing an identity and presenting a vision of Islam that is Chinese in its core values, yet unmistakably Islamic. He thus contributed significantly to the refinement, legitimation, and popularization of Sino-Islamic intellectual simultaneity at the meeting place of two great civilizations.

Selective Learning from the Middle East: The Case of Sino-Muslim Students at al-Azhar University

As a part of a broader Islamic modernist program, Chinese Muslim students went to Egypt—to al-Azhar University in Cairo—in the 1930s to bring home not only true Islamic teachings but also means of empowerment for Muslims in China. Influenced by their personal backgrounds, their interactions with local Muslims, and their aspirations within the Chinese Republican state apparatus, these cultural intermediaries between Chinese Muslims and the Islamic heartlands chose to highlight modernist thought in the Islamic world and to emphasize Chinese nationalism and a cooperative relationship with the Chinese state.

The Multiple Meanings of Pilgrimage in Sino-Islamic Thought

This chapter examines the construction of the idea of “pilgrimage” in the works of key Han kitāb authors Wang Daiyu (1590-1658), Liu Zhi (1670-1724), and Ma Dexin (1794-1874). All three advocated pilgrimage as a religious ideal, but each successive generation gave greater weight to its requirement as an obligatory observance, as Sino-Muslims gradually entered a more interconnected Islamic context. The perception of the ḥajj changed from a symbol of true belief to a potential critical practice, and it finally emerged as an essential religious duty. Wang Daiyu outlined the theological foundations of the pilgrimage and its role as a link to the time of creation and union with God. Liu Zhi underlined the physical practice of potential pilgrims, stressing the ceremonial and experiential aspects of the pilgrimage and detailing the practices it entailed. Ma Dexin emphasized the performative aspect of the journey itself, asserting its doctrinal necessity while arguing for its power to rectify and renew religious understanding.

Editor’s Introduction: Four Centuries of Islamic Thought in Chinese

Muslims have lived in the Chinese culture area since the seventh or eighth century – the mid-Tang dynasty – and have acculturated, as all immigrants do, in order to live comfortably in what began as an alien environment. Over a millennium, through ordinary social processes, including intermarriage with local women, they ceased being utterly foreign and became local but different, Sinophone but not entirely Chinese. Though they spoke the Chinese of their home districts, many of them nonetheless retained female endogamy (males could marry non-Muslim women who converted to Islam), pork avoidance, unfamiliar rituals, mosque-centred community solidarity, and outlandish vocabulary, rendering them unconventional, somewhat distant, sometimes defensively hostile towards their non-Muslim neighbours, who saw them as ‘familiar strangers’....

Between ‘Abd al-Wahhab and Liu Zhi: Chinese Muslim Intellectuals at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

This article surveys Chinese Muslim intellectuals at the turn of the 21st century, dividing them into three sociological categories: (1) officials and state-approved scholars; (2) religious clerics (imams); and (3) unofficial scholars, headmasters or laoshi (teachers) in private institutions, writers, journalists, webmasters, and more. It focuses on the divide between advocates of a culturally Chinese Islam, the “Liu Zhi tendency,” as opposed to those who view Islam as a holistic, universal religion, the “‘Abd al-Wahhab tendency.” These definitions distinguish between a national, local expression of religion and an ahistorical, non-national one. In the 1990s, the latter—sometimes called “Salafi” or “Wahhabi”—rejected the Liu Zhi defenders as acculturated non-believers, distant observers rather than members of the umma. All of these participants make use of new media on the Internet as well as print publications and electronic broadcast formats. In the new century, Chinese Muslim intellectuals have sometimes had to compromise, some of them concluding that the core of Islam must remain inviolate while its national expression can be culturally Chinese. These various tendencies are illustrated with multiple biographies of exemplary thinkers, concluding with the striking intellectual evolution of Zhang Weizhen, a charismatic headmaster and teacher.

Ethnicity or Religion? Republican-Era Chinese Debates on Islam and Muslims

This chapter examines internal Sino-Muslim disputes from the late Qing into later Republican China over the question of whether the Sino-Muslims were a separate ethnic group, the Huizu, or rather a religious minority within the Han ethnicity, the Hanzu. Through the writings of Huang Zhenpan, Ding Baochen, Yin Boqing, Xue Wenbo and other Sino-Muslim intellectuals it illuminates the question of Hui ethnic status as a divisive controversy among Sino-Muslim elites during the crucial formative period of modern Chinese national state and identity. Several different interpretations of the Huizu ethnicity emerged from these polemics. Some considered the Huizu as an inclusive Muslim ethnicity, encompassing all Muslim populations in both Eastern China and in the Western borderlands, regardless of linguistic or cultural background. Others regarded the Sino-Muslims as part of the global and Pan-Islamic “Muslim nation,” and still others as including only the culturally Chinese Sinophone Muslim communities. Based on modern Muslim periodicals, this chapter demonstrates the debates’ influence on the Muslim policies of all the 20th century Chinese regimes, including the Guomindang and Communist Party.

Secularisation and Modernisation of Islam in China: Educational Reform, Japanese Occupation and the Disappearance of Persian Learning

This chapter describes the rise of modern Islamic schooling in China and the disappearance of the traditional curriculum, partially based on Persian textbooks on the unity of being (wahdat al-wujūd). In the 1920s and 1930s, Islamic reformism became popular among city dwellers in the Chinese coastal regions. They wanted to foster bilingual (Chinese and Arabic) religious and educational leaders who accepted modern schooling, to require Chinese literacy of Muslim students and to promote nation building against foreign pressures. They judged that the traditional learning in both Arabic and Persian was both too time-consuming and ineffective in legitimizing Sino-Muslims’ presence in Chinese society. In Japan’s occupied area during the Anti-Japanese War, however, Persian learning was preserved by some non-political members of Sino-Muslim society. Persian learning is now rapidly disappearing in China, especially since the political turmoil of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution.